-find a girl(boy)friend that speaks no english
-recoginise that you might learn more out of the classroom than in it

i have a friend from england who showed up in china 2.5 months ago knowing no chinese at all. by employing the two strategies above, he ran through the entire blcu language track in 8 weeks and now possesses near native level fluency, in spite of a (very) poor attendence record. in fact, when he speaks, he sounds an awful lot like a beijing taxi driver.

while not everyone has such a good ear and/or capacity to memorize and use new vocab, having witnessed his studies from day 1, i dare say he's onto something.